Paul J. Steinhardt is currently the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, where he is on the faculty of both the Departments of Physics and of Astrophysical Sciences. His research spans problems in particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology, condensed matter physics and geoscience. He is best known for his development of new theories of the origin, evolution and future of the universe. In the early 1980s, he co-authored seminal papers that helped to lay the foundations of inflationary cosmology. Beginning in 2000s, motivated by what he viewed as the failures of inflationary theory, he became a leading developer of a new class of cosmological models that replace the so-called big bang with a bounce, known as the cyclic theory of the universe. Steinhardt is also well known for his exploration of a new form of matter, known as quasicrystals, which were thought to exist only as man-made materials until he co-discovered the first known natural quasicrystal in a museum sample. He subsequently led a separate team that followed up that discovery with several more examples of natural quasicrystals recovered from the wilds of the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia.
Steinhardt grew up in Miami, Florida, where he attended Coral Gables Senior High School while attending classes at a local university. He received his Bachelor of Science in Physics at Caltech in 1974, and his Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard University in 1978 where his advisor was Sidney Coleman. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1978 to 1981; rose from junior faculty to Mary Amanda Wood Professor at the University of Pennsylvania between 1981 and 1998, during which he maintained a long-term association with the Thomas J.
Watson Research Center; and has been on the faculty at Princeton University since the Fall of 1998. He co-founded the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science and served as its Director from 2007 to 2019.
IFT Colloquium
March 28, 2024
3:00pm in 1002 NPB
Title: The Second Kind of Impossible
Abstract: Quasicrystals are exotic materials with symmetries once thought to be impossible for matter. This talk will describe the decades-long adventures searching for them in nature and other exotic environments, resulting in one of the strangest scientific stories you will ever hear.
IFT Seminar
March 29, 2024
3:00 PM, in 2165 NPB
Title: How the Universe became smooth and flat
Abstract: The foremost challenge for any cosmological theory is to explain how the early universe came to be homogeneous, isotropic and flat. A period of inflation shortly after the big bang is a standard explanation. This talk will consider whether this explanation really works and if it is the only possibility.